“What about reciprocity?” I asked. At bottom, our ecological crisis boils down to one simple fact: humans are taking more than we’re giving back to the Earth. What if each of us started giving back as much as we take—in all our relationships, with the human and more-than-human worlds? Even a simple gesture like showing gratitude can make a difference. Everyone loves to be thanked! Reducing our use of unsustainable resources is a solid first step in giving back to the Earth.

What follows are 10 close-to-home ways you can give back to the Earth.

1. Eat closer to home. The average American foodstuff travels 1500 miles to reach the table. That’s an astronomical amount of fossil fuel used just in transporting the food, to say nothing of growing and packaging it. Until our fuel sources are more sustainable, perhaps those bananas or Australian wines (to pick two of my faves) should be a special treat, not a staple. For more info, see the energy stats at Sustainable Table.

2. Thank your food. Look, really look, at the plants and animals on your table. Notice each one. Think about the rice or oat or wheat grasses waving under the sun, the carrots developing underground, the strawberries ripening on the vine. Most of all, if you eat meat, think about every animal. Picture the cow grazing (if you eat cows, eat grass-fed, not corn-fed ones), the chicken scratching, the fish swimming, the life labor that the hen put forth in making an egg, the goat her milk. Thank each animal, every time, for the gifts of their lives and their bodies. Christians call it saying grace. Buddhists call it eating mindfully. All of us can thank the plants and animals. Our lives depend on them. Literally.

3. Pick your teeth the old-fashioned way. Wooden toothpicks are biodegradable, unlike the little plastic gadgets most dentists’ offices try to pass out to their patients. Those tiny plastic picks and brushes only end up in landfills—not a good way to give back to the Earth! Many of them escape down rivers, becoming part of the enormous swirling toilet bowls of plastic in our oceans and endangering the lives of seabirds. When your dentist offers you little plastic tools for dental hygiene, say no thanks.

4. Teach your children reciprocity. Even small children understand fairness. No one wants to get the short end of the stick. Teach your children to give back when they receive something. Practice it yourself. If each of us truly gave as much as we took, the world would change.

5. Thank a tree. As you walk down your street, notice one tree or plant every day. Thank it for making oxygen. Your life depends on it.

6. Work to reduce pesticide use in your area. We all know about pesticide use in agriculture, but pesticides are used at an equivalent rate on suburban lawns. What about the playing fields at your local school? (Fungicides and herbicides are pesticides too.) Children absorb more pesticides per pound of body weight than do adults, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Next on my to-do list: a letter to my local HOA about the annual pesticide application on our pristine common lawn. I’d really rather have a common area that my dog—and all the children on the street—can run and play in safely. For more info, see the “Lawn Care” page at Beyond Pesticides.

7. Refuse overpackaging. Say no thanks to foods or supplements prepackaged in tiny portions. Every piece of plastic ends up in a landfill—if we’re lucky and it doesn’t end up on beaches or in the ocean. Though I love a certain brand of rice cheese, I’m giving it up because it is packaged in individual slices wrapped in plastic.

8. Host a zero-waste party. It’s easier than you think. Paper plates and cups can be composted in municipal composting processes, and cornstarch-based compostable flatware is becoming easy to find. To use even fewer resources (except for water), visit your local thrift store and buy a few dozen older plates and forks and wash them afterward. If you don’t have room to store them, donate them back after the party’s over. Same with napkins and glasses. I spent $25 at a thrift store for my last party and then got credit afterward for the same amount in donation. That thrift store benefits a nonprofit group, so when they sell their merchandise twice they raise even more money.

9. Volunteer for a cleanup or restoration project in your area. People have no idea how much fun these projects are. You get the pleasure of meeting like-minded neighbors in addition to the joy of giving back to the Earth in a very direct way. The sense of camaraderie and a deep-seated satisfaction after a day or a half day of work keep restoration volunteers coming back time after time. They look forward to having more fun. For a list of organizations working in ecological restoration around the country, see Global Restoration Network.

10. Work for the circle of life in your industry. I was astonished to learn recently that nearly half of GM plants are now “nil to the landfill.” If an industry like auto making can stop sending materials to landfills, certainly other industries can follow suit! How did the Earth survive for billions of years, perfecting the ability to sustain life? By a system of exchange in which every part of the whole gives off something others need. One species’s waste is another species’s fuel. What the organisms of Earth have been doing for billions of years, we will have to learn to do in every industry. Waste to fuel, around the circle. That means finding ways to break down plastics, mop up oil spills, and treat sewage by contributing something that someone else in the ecosystem needs. Interdependence is the name of the survival game. What if you are not an engineer or inventor? Then start with recycling. Even your office could be zero waste.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

10 ways to give back to the Earth

Related posts:

1. Reciprocity
2. Earth is the new bottom line
3. In defense of food

People sometimes ask me where I fall in the science-religion debates. I teach the one (religion), I study and often write about the other (science). But I think both science and religion often skip too quickly over what ought to be the main attraction: the natural world. The world of fox kits and forests, eating and being eaten, thunder and sunsets. The world immediately available to our senses. This  is the world often bypassed in the rush to explore some dimension regarded as more important, more true, or more “real.”

I mean, think about science education. We start kids out in elementary school with lessons that teach them to observe through their own eyes, ears, nose, and fingers. Yet by the time they’re in high school we sit them behind microscopes, where they imbibe the unconscious message that the real story is not how eagles lock talons in flight or how worms turn garbage into fertilizer, but rather how their lab equipment reveals a truer world than the one they can see with their unaided eyes. In biology, for instance, we teach them to separate out the constituent parts of the ecosphere and analyze each piece—a (dead) frog, water, a rock—instead of teaching them to learn by being immersed in the (living) complexity of the whole. A system that focuses on the parts and more rarely on the whole, as does Western science, is a system that yields easily to quantifying its observations, and so numbers—abstractions, mental constructs—take  precedence over the senses as the most trusted means of exploring the natural world.

Or take religion. Banished since Descartes to the realm of spirit or mind, religion often focuses its attention everywhere but the living, natural world—on a world after death or a world inside the mind or a social world to be created in the future. I know this intimately, having spent much of my life first in churches, both conservative and liberal, then in religious studies. Western religion in general, and Christianity in particular, has been slow to perceive what faith has to do with agriculture or forests or the rising acidity of oceans.

Neither science nor religion, as its primary method, takes people out directly into nature to explore, through their own senses, the relationships right under their noses.

For indeed, the natural world is a world of relationships—between whales and climate change, between cows and humans, between pasqueflowers and snow, between mycelial mat and soil, between jet exhausts and jet streams, and of course between humans and one another. A world that functions through webs of interconnected relationships, if we hope to understand even one corner of it, demands the sharp, clear-eyed vision and an intellectual acuity that we normally associate with science.

So I’m making a plea for natural history. It’s a field that has suffered a decline of respect in recent decades, perhaps because it involves observing more than experimenting. It lacks the prestige—in funding, in university status—of sciences that overtly try to predict nature’s patterns or control its processes. Naturalists tend to be public educators, observing plants or forests and communicating their learning to “laypeople” through educational hikes or birdwatching tours. Famous naturalists, like John Muir or Aldo Leopold, were accomplished writers and thinkers as well as observers of the natural world. Perhaps it is this willingness to engage philosophy that sometimes, these days, leaves natural history at the edge of the sciences, not quite “hard” enough to satisfy those who might think science means only quantitative analysis. (Such folks would do well to remember Darwin.)

In a time of ecological crisis, we need numbers and quantitative models, yes, to convince those who hold the purse strings that climate change is real or that more species are disappearing now than in millions of years. But we also need people for whom observing the natural world is tinged with love. We need, in other words, more naturalists. It’s a job not limited to scientists. In fact, it’s a job where science and religion regularly meet. It works like this.

Squat beside a creek. Dig one finger into the rough silt along its edge. Pick up a glob of sand and sift it through your fingers. At your feet you may notice pebbles, your eyes moving now to larger stones, and then to the flicker of a trout tail next to that large boulder. The trout, you notice, likes to live in the shadows, which may lead you to realize that the willows hanging over the creekbed must be important to the fish, and so are the deep bends in the stream, and even if you haven’t yet heard a naturalist say that fish need shade and meanders in order to spawn, you’ve already absorbed several lessons in natural history just by squatting here.

As your eyes wander up the flow of the stream, you might notice your mind begin to flow as well toward questions such as how the rocks came to be here, and how long it takes brush or ferns to grow across the currents. And in your reverie your thoughts turn to the centuries that have passed with this water flowing here, past this boulder, and the eons that you hope are yet to come. Before you know it, reflecting on the sand under your fingertips and the trout before your eyes has turned you toward questions of meaning and how you might live in a harmony with these surroundings—questions usually assigned to ethics or religion.

This is the power of the natural world—to lead one moment toward science and the next to spirituality. To nudge us in a seamless transition from observing with our senses to contemplating meaning. And this is why, when it comes to spiritual practices, my favorite is the simple act of watching and wondering—an experience that I as a scholar of religion share with birders and biologists, children and astrophysicists, hikers and climbers and geologists.

The world is here for us to wonder at, to learn from, and to love. Nature discriminates not at all between science and religion. Perhaps we would do well to follow its cue.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Where science and religion meet: the natural world

Related posts:

1. A spirituality of THIS world
2. Trusting the senses
3. The great work of Thomas Berry

When the dozen or so in the herd had gathered, and the humans had discussed how to stay safe, we were invited to enter the pasture. One request: that we allow the horses to initiate physical contact. Here’s Shannon, an EAMH teacher, getting us started:

Right away something happened to the person who was the least excited to be there. Kistie had received negative messages about horses when she was a child—”these horses will bite”—and now she was feeling real fear. As we wandered gingerly into the pasture, a horse spotted her and ambled directly up to her. Kistie continues the story:

I’m panicking, right?—because he came up to me, put his mouth right in my face. I’m thinking, he’s going to bite my face off. But I decide to just chill. Then he started rubbing my shoulder, so then I’m thinking, if I don’t pet him or touch him the right way, is he going to bite my arm off? He backed a few steps away from me, then he started forward toward me again. That’s when I really panicked. But I stood there and told myself, I should breathe now. I don’t have to let panic take control. I just decided to back away, like a frightened horse would. I said, you know, I can just walk away. That was my aha! moment—when I could take back control.

Working with the horses, said our equine teachers, always shows us something. The horses are great mirrors.

We spent about an hour with the horses—what our teachers called the “discovery phase.” We were getting acquainted, seeing what it felt like to be introduced to creatures very different from us or, like Joan, what it felt like to be nuzzled by a huge nose and hot streams of breath.

I loved wandering around the pasture, saying hello to one then another of the horses. I petted and stroked a number of them—after getting permission from them, of course. They seemed peaceful, curious, sometimes affectionate. One or two, after getting their necks rubbed, followed my hand for more, just like our dog.

In a weekend packed with human conversations, it was a treat to hang quietly for a while with horses.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Discovering horses

No related posts.

Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle

The story juices me because Butters Canyon was my home for some years, and I founded this land trust in 2001. I never set out to work in land conservation. It’s just that I got radicalized by a little urban creek flowing far below my kitchen window.

My partner and I bought the hillside house during the rainy El Niño winter of 1997–98, and Peralta Creek was a roaring presence outside the house during the first months we lived there. For years I walked this stretch of Butters Drive with my dog, Sapphire, soaking in the peace of spreading bay trees and the seasonal trickle of water nestled in a crevice of tangled green.

But in 1998 when I moved in, the base of the canyon was a mess. Peering over the edge of the street, you could see a mattress or two, some tires lodged in the dirt, and more pieces of old machinery than you could count. So with the help of the city’s hauling service, the neighbors and I organized a creek cleanup. I’d never been part of one and had no idea if people were interested in stumbling up and down fifty feet of steep, poison oak–strewn canyon hillside to haul trash out of a creekbed.

But that foggy September morning, around fifty people showed up, and over the course of the day we wrested out stoves, bed springs, enough rusty furnishings to fill an apartment. You can still see photos from the first creek cleanup on the land trust’s website. The ones who stuck around for pizza and sunshine gathered for a group photo that afternoon. That’s me in the red shirt holding my small next-door neighbor:

The following spring, when a parcel in the canyon came up for sale, the logical next step was a land trust. Not that I knew anything about land trusts or had ever worked in real estate. But there are books and people to ask for advice, and with their help I filed the papers and called a few people together as a board. We wrote up our strategic plan, started fund-raising . . . and a decade later the land trust completes this stage of its mission.

I moved out of the neighborhood long ago so have not been part of the workings of the land trust for most of its life. But I took this lesson with me: Never underestimate the power of a creek to change your thinking, and your life.

Update: KTVU in the Bay Area picked up the Butters Canyon Conservancy story, and you can watch it here.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Radicalized by a creek

Related posts:

1. Visiting old friends in the Bay Area
2. Farms and cars polluting Rocky Mountain lakes
3. A red-letter, um, rose-breasted day

These are students at Goshen College, my alma mater, a private college of about a thousand in northern Indiana. They’re singing a piece by Biebl that Chanticleer made popular on a Christmas CD. (I think they could give Chanticleer a run for their money.)

The college is Mennonite. When I was a Mennonite we were different, but maybe not in the ways you think. We looked like everyone else. We just sang differently. Because musical instruments were banned in churches until fifty or so years ago, Mennonites sang unaccompanied four-part harmony. To this day a crowd of hundreds can break into pitch-perfect four-part renditions of favorite songs.

When I was enrolled at Goshen, students loved singing so much they would gather in dorm rooms by the dozens to sing hymns, for pete’s sake. If you’ve never experienced blending your voice with a choir, you might not understand the rush. To feel such harmonies vibrating in your own flesh—well, it’s a fast track to oneness for the mystically inclined. A yoga of sound.

Because I started college as a music major, I got to immerse myself daily in superb musical experiences. Some of my favorite memories are of choir tours, especially concerts in chapels where the acoustics made us sound like angels.

Did I mention that this Mennonite school is where I got radicalized? It was the seventies, and religion profs fresh from Boston brought the latest biblical criticism and feminist theology. Not to mention that international education was a requirement. When 90 percent of the student body has lived for a few months in a Third World or (at the time) Eastern European country, it lends a different political flavor to a campus. Getting radicalized at a church college—through theology, if you can believe it—means I have never once doubted that religion can be progressive.

The year after I graduated, Reagan was elected, and the religious lines hardened at the school as they did elsewhere in the country. But these videos tell me that the music is still magic.

And now for something completely different from some of the same voices:

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Where I come from, they know how to sing

Related posts:

1. Music magic with Bobby McFerrin

DOT EARTH: The blog of Andrew Revkin, New York Times correspondent on climate change. Revkin will be leaving the Times shortly (budget cuts) but hopes to continue writing this influential blog. The go-to place for what’s happening in the science and politics of global warming.

COVERING CLIMATE CHANGE: A free online course by Tom Julsman of the Center for Environmental Journalism at CU Boulder. It’s not just for journalists. As the opening words of the course say:

You say you have no intention of becoming an environmental reporter?

Well, guess what? You already are one.

Climate talk has moved way past science and into everyone’s backyards. Everything you do today, from brushing your teeth to fixing dinner, has climate change implications. The more you know, the better choices you can make—and help others make.

CLIMATE ETHICS BLOG: It’s not just about individual choices. It’s about the fact that the habits of a small part of the world—us—are wrecking the living conditions for vast numbers of people and creatures in other parts of the world. Connect with people thinking about the social justice implications. Blog by the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State.

TEACHERS’ GUIDE TO CLIMATE CHANGE: For K-12 teachers in particular. A comprehensive guide to “high-quality educational materials on climate change and global warming.” Includes lesson plans.

HOT QUESTIONS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE: Last, but certainly not least, a series of four commonly asked questions about climate change. Produced by UCAR at the National Center for Atmospheric Research here in Boulder and narrated by cool chick Sharon Glassman:

• 1. What difference can a few degrees make?

• 2. Can people really change the climate?
• 3. Can’t we wait and fix the climate until things get really bad?
• 4. It’s cold here today—whatever happened to global warming?

For the video answers to questions 2–4, see the UCAR site.

Share your favorite teaching aids on climate change in the comments below.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Teaching about climate change

Related posts:

1. “From future threat to present emergency”: Boulder panel on climate change
2. Women, farming, and climate change
3. Climate Action Day 2009

First Lady Obama’s farm flourished over the summer, fed by abundant moisture. By July the White House farm had already yielded over 200 pounds of food. See the fast-motion plant growth beginning at 5:45 in this video:

By contrast, women farmers in equatorial regions of the world are watching their water sources dry up. In this video from GenderCC, Annabell Waititu of Kenya, an expert on gender, policy, and environment, lays out the problem succinctly (starting at :52): Because of climate change, the Mount Kenya snowcap has shrunk, and Kenyan rivers that depend on Mount Kenya for water and that used to flow year-round are now seasonal. Women walk farther to get water for crops, and animal herders move downhill to water sources. More conflict is taking place “because almost every conflict that you find in Kenya is about water resources.”

It’s well known that climate change affects poor people more adversely, but it is less often said that climate change affects women and men differently, insofar as they occupy different social positions and perform different roles. Women are 70% of the world’s poor, according to the UN Millennium Campaign, and the poor—especially poor women—tend to rely more directly on earth resources for sustaining daily life. Those who gather the wood, carry the water, and grow the crops, the majority of whom are women, suffer the most directly from climate change.

Discrimination against women also plays an enormous role in how women experience the effects of climate change. In India, for example, where women have seen their crop yields cut in half and the quality of grain diminish because of climate changes, women’s health is impaired from the double whammy of inferior crops and inequality. Sita Debi, a farmer in this next video (from Find Your Feet, a UK group working to end rural poverty) says,

When there is no rain, we women have to work really hard in the fields to try and grow crops. Our nutrition also suffers because we are the last to eat at the family table. A lot of us are anemic as a result.

Because of gender inequity, women, who grow the majority of food in much of the world, own only 1 to 15% of the world’s land. Women also have less access to information, such as disaster warnings, which means that as weather events increase in intensity due to climate change, women have less chance of moving to safe ground.

In spite of these inequities, women are taking leadership around the world in adapting to climate change. If you watched the above video, you heard a woman who heads an agricultural program in India observe that rural Indian women are already taking preventative measures against climate change:

Women here are incredibly resourceful. They are taking out loans from self-help groups to buy livestock so that they don’t have to depend on their crops. And groups of women often take out joint loans for irrigation equipment. . . . They also practice multicropping, so that if one crop is destroyed by bad weather, other crops will provide for their needs.

Although they are community leaders, women typically have less access to official decision making—at the local as well as the international level. Women’s perspectives are not yet heard equally with men’s in making climate change policy. From GenderCC (Women for Climate Justice):

Virtually absent and excluded from the negotiations are the people from the ground, whose lives are mostly affected—by the impacts of climate change itself, and by some of the solutions to mitigate climate change, too, that are decided without asking their opinions and consent. Even less represented are women, who eventually have to carry most of the burdens of the changing climate and the top-down decisions and remedies offered.

In other words, farmers too need to sit at the table—the policy-making table.

And here’s where the discussion comes back to this country—because gender discrimination is alive and well in the United States too and is having an effect on international climate change discussions.

The UN Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) from 1979 is an international treaty for women’s rights. In the countries where it has been ratified, it has improved women’s lives—and thus the whole society—in many ways. Here is a small sample, according to Amnesty USA:

• ensuring married women share ownership of joint property in China
• improving health care for indigenous and migrant women in Argentina, Mexico, and Australia
• using state funds to create policies and programs to end domestic violence in Uganda

As of August 2009, 185 countries had ratified the treaty. Only 8 countries have failed to ratify it: Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Qatar, Nauru, Palau, Tonga, and the United States.

The Obama administration has placed CEDAW ratification high on its to-do list, but the government can only go as far as the American people go. Grassroots support is needed to get this important human rights treaty through the Senate.

The CEDAW committee of the UN is working hard right now to get women’s voices included in climate change talks. As the clock ticks toward December’s UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Copenhagen, the committee urges women’s participation:

Women are not just helpless victims of climate change—they are powerful agents of change and their leadership is critical. All stakeholders should ensure that climate change and disaster risk reduction measures are gender responsive, sensitive to indigenous knowledge systems and respect human rights.

Our First Lady, like millions of women around the world, is a farmer. She (with the help of a large staff) is growing food to feed a family and community. But she lives in a country that has not yet ratified a principal human rights treaty—one that will help ensure that women farmers around the globe share in the process of making decisions about climate change.

What you can do:

• Work to reduce climate change. It’s the CO2 emissions of the rich countries that are endangering women in poor countries. We all know what needs to be done—and what each of us needs to do.
• Work to get CEDAW ratified. It’s to our national shame that we have not yet ratified this treaty. Call or write your US senators to urge them to support ratification.
• Support local farmers. Eat locally grown food in season as much as possible. Shop at farmers’ markets.
• Work to end discrimination against women wherever you are. How about decision making in your family? At your place of work? In your local and state governments? Do women communicate while men decide? Work to overcome stereotyped roles; make sure women and men share the social, economic, decision-making, and nurturing work in each of your communities as much as possible.
• Educate locally. Write letters-to-the-editor in support of CEDAW, blog about climate change, talk about human rights and gender equality in the classroom.
• Follow developments leading up to December’s UN talks on climate change in Copenhagen. The UN summit on climate change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen is the next major international meeting on the climate crisis.

For more information:

• UN Fact Sheet on Women, Gender Equality, and Climate Change available on this page
• International Day of Rural Women, from UN WomenWatch
• GenderCC, Women for Climate Justice
• “Why Climate Change is a Woman’s Problem,” from Isis International
• AWARD, African Women in Agricultural Research and Development
• “Africa Climate Change Threatens Life and Health of Maasai Women,” from Women’s News Network
• Find Your Feet, a British group working to end rural poverty in India and Malawi; blog post on women & climate change here
• Ecumenical Women at the United Nations: blog post “On Gender, Climate Change, and the Green Bible”
• ” ‘We Know What We Need’: South Asian Women Speak Out on Climate Change Adaptation,” pdf available from this page
• “Put Women at the Core of Climate Change Debate,” from IRIN
• On CEDAW and its chances for Senate ratification from the Women’s Media Center
• CEDAW fact sheet from Amnesty USA
• CEDAW Resource Kit from AAUW
• About the UNFCCC

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Women, farming, and climate change

Related posts:

1. “From future threat to present emergency”: Boulder panel on climate change
2. Teaching about climate change
3. Climate Action Day 2009

If I could reveal anything that is hidden from us, at least in modern cultures, it would be…that we live in a competent universe, that we are part of a brilliant planet, and that we are surrounded by genius.

Janine Benyus in her 2009 TED talk urges people to solve design problems by looking to the organisms and natural systems that have been shaping such solutions for billions of years. Biomimicry, according to the nonprofit Biomimicry Institute, is “the science and art of emulating Nature’s best biological ideas to solve human problems.” Says Benyus,

Learning about the natural world is one thing. Learning FROM the natural world—that’s the profound switch.

For more information, see:

• The Guardian article on Benyus’s talk
• The Biomimicry Institute
• AskNature.org, a database of nature’s strategies and strategists
  

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Biomimicry: “We are surrounded by genius”

Related posts:

1. Teaching about climate change

McKibben was joined by retired physicist Al Bartlett, who has done a lot of work on population control; Kevin Trenberth of NCAR, a lead author for IPCC (and a Nobel Prize winner); Brian Toon, cloud expert and chair of atmospheric science at CU, whose grad adviser was Carl Sagan; Diane McKnight, engineering professor who works on the biogeochemistry of lakes and streams; and Bob Henson, meteorologist who wrote The Rough Guide to Climate Change.

Moderator Richard Brenne, cracking jokes, got right down to business with his first question: “Is civilization a good idea?” To which Bill McKibben replied, to applause,

Do we have a big enough heart to go with the big brain?

McKibben explained that the scientific method (as seen in the IPCC) has worked in addressing climate change, but the political leadership has failed. Which is why McKibben is organizing 350 Day on October 24, an international day of grassroots climate action. The number 350 represents the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that scientists think is sustainable. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the usual concentration was 275. We’re already way past the recommended limit, at 390. And 390, as we can see already, is high enough to melt the Arctic—which is compounding the warming problem. McKibben explained:

There is so much methane in the permafrost that if we melt the Arctic, we could stop all the cars in the world, and it won’t stop the CO2 increase.

Talk turned to the enormous obstacles—economic, political—to changing course.  McKibben stated the size of the challenge:

Addressing climate change means turning off the coal industry within twenty years. I mean, ExxonMobil just made more money last year than has ever been made in the history of money—

At which point a protester mounted the stage and interrupted loudly. The moderator jumped up, and half a dozen audience members escorted the man off the stage while the audience shouted over him, “Please leave the stage! Please leave the stage!”

Which turned the discussion to how to bring those who disagree on board—and some frustration at the shrill tactics of the naysayers. Bob Henson offered a compassionate suggestion, to applause:

It’s important to remember that everyone is coming from somewhere; everyone has their own point of view. It’s important to remember people’s humanity.

There was a litany of the places in the world who have not created the global warming problem but are set to suffer most from it—the Maldives archipelago, which sits a scant two meters above sea level at its highest point, or Bangladesh—but water specialist Diane McKnight brought the conversation right back home:

We have to realize that climate change has already impacted our water supply—right now. Metal concentrations and acidity in water are going up because of climate change. That’s happening right here, now.

She added that 80 percent of Boulder’s water use goes to water lawns:

We’re chlorinating the whole region with our water practices.

Al Bartlett added to the conversation the problem of runaway population growth:

Any fraction of global warming can be attributed to human actions, and that alone is proof that human population has exceeded earth’s carrying capacity.

Panelists agreed that empowering women is a huge first step in reducing population growth—a step that has no downside, “unless you’re a misogynist,” added the moderator.

But most of the conversation centered on fossil fuels. Said Bill McKibben:

Fossil fuel defines modernity. Getting off it will be the biggest task we’ve ever attempted.

Al Bartlett added that food policies will have to be drastically altered:

Think about agriculture—how much energy is required to put food on your plate. That energy used to be person-energy. Person-energy on farms has been replaced by petroleum energy. For every unit of food on your plate, it’s estimated that ten units of petroleum have been expended.

And then there’s the sheer destructive power that we have unleashed since the Industrial Revolution. Said Brian Toon,

This is first time human beings have changed the planet on a geologic time scale: CO2 stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years. It’s an insidious problem. The CO2 lifetime is so long that by the time we see it’s a terrible problem, it’s already too late.

The grand convergence of the panel, if there was one, centered on the sheer emergency we face. Said Bill McKibben,

We need to change our understanding of climate change from future threat to present emergency.

What can ordinary people do? The list was only begun by the panel:

• Reduce energy use.
• Educate children about global warming.
• Provide political will for elected officials. Even well-meaning presidents can’t lead too far ahead of the public will. Show elected leaders the public is ready to take emergency measures to reduce fossil fuel use and address global warming.
• Get involved on 350 Day.
• Support slower population growth by making sure every child is a wanted child.
• Work to empower women.
  

And one final suggestion by Diane McKnight:

Encourage environmental empathy. Encourage empathy for communities around the world. Foster empathy.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

“From future threat to present emergency”: Boulder panel on climate change

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It is indeed an emergency we face. Ten years ago environmental educator David W. Orr opened the first edition of his book Earth in Mind with some dismal numbers—numbers that have only worsened since then:

If today is a typical day on planet earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rain forest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, the result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 250 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 250. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Tonight the earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.

Orr points out that these grim realities have been created not by illiterate but by highly educated people. The problem is not lack of education but the wrong kind of it. He quotes Elie Wiesel, who said regarding the education that prepared Holocaust perpetrators for their deadly acts:

It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.

I think Wiesel’s list can be summarized very simply: It was education that had forgotten relationships.

In a time of ecological crisis, we need education that values, fosters, and increases awareness of relationships—relationships between human beings, and between humans and the more-than-human world.

Forty years ago, in the summer that saw both the moon landing and Woodstock, the first issue of the Journal of Environmental Education was published in a new field that was preparing students to interact with the wider web of relationships. The citizens produced by environmental education were to be, in the words of William B. Stapp, the founder of environmental education:

knowledgeable concerning the biophysical environment and its associated problems, aware of how to help solve these problems, and motivated to work toward their solution.

A recent article in Educational Leadership, written by environmental educator Mike Weilbacher, asks if Stapp’s goals have been achieved. He answers,

In a word, no. . . . Although students are overwhelmingly “pro-environment,” they possess remarkably little information about breaking environmental issues. One small example: We asked them to name one bird they can identify by song. The leading answer? None. If local birds disappear from the landscape because of extinction, or arrive three weeks late because of warming climates, it’s possible that no one will notice.

Weilbacher cites a number of reasons for the ignorance in a litany that will be familiar to teachers. The reasons include students’ extreme disconnection from nature (and connection to electronic screens) as well as the No Child Left Behind policy, which forces teachers to teach to the test and has led to a decrease in class field trips. In fact, Weibacher reports, the website of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation stated this year:

No Child Left Behind is contributing to an increasing environmental literacy gap by reducing the amount of environmental education taking place in K–12 classrooms.

At this point in time, says Weilbacher, environmental knowledge—knowledge of relationships—is drastically lagging:

Even though there are more centers for environmental education and more college degree programs in environment-related fields than ever, and even though building green schools has suddenly emerged as an important idea (pre-economic meltdown), we are perhaps even farther from environmental literacy than we were in 1969.

Fortunately, there are bright spots as well—programs and schools that are working to connect students with nature. He cites the No Child Left Inside initiative; green charter schools; watershed education curricula; and Wood Kindergartens, actually preschools where children spend the entire day outdoors.

Weilbacher also offers a list of 10 things every student should know about the environment. He does not start with the drastic environmental news, like I did here; he believes kids need to first learn how resilient, lively, and creative nature is. I think he’s right.

I invite you to peruse his list with the idea of relationships in mind. It strikes me that every one of these points has to do with the interconnected, interrelated web of relationships in which we are immersed.

What Every Student Should Know About the Environment

There are scores of possible models of environmental education programs, and most have many of the following large concepts in common. As students go from kindergarten through high school, they can work their way down the list.

1. Earth overflows with life.
   One of science’s biggest mysteries is how many species share this planet— estimates range from 5 million to 100 million species. Many environmental education programs begin with the premise that life is vanishing; young learners should first know that Earth teems with a huge number of creatures.
2. Each creature is uniquely adapted to its environment.
   Every species evolved to possess a unique set of adaptations that enables it to survive and thrive in its ecosystem. Students should be on a first-name basis with many local creatures.
3. The web of life is interdependent.
   Organisms evolve complex relationships, each depending on numerous other species for their survival.
4. Materials flow through ecosystems in cycles.
   All creatures need water, air, and nutrients to survive. These materials cycle and recycle through ecosystems. The water we drink today is the same water we’ve always had, and always will.
5. The sun is the ultimate source of energy flowing through ecosystems.
   Food grows from sunlight energy; our houses are heated by fossil fuels created many millennia ago from ancient sunlight.
6. There is no waste in nature; everything is recycled.
   In nature, every waste product is used by other creatures. Humans have bent those circles into straight lines, where things are used once and tossed.
7. We consume resources to live.
   Every student should know where the trash truck takes the trash, where water comes from, and how the nearest power plant makes electricity.
8. Conservation is the wise use of finite resources.
   We are physical creatures with real needs—to eat, drink, build houses, write on paper. But how do we use these resources sustainably?
9. Humans can have a profound effect on environmental systems.
   Fossil fuels pump carbon dioxide into the sky; habitat loss is causing the extinction of large numbers of species. Our actions profoundly affect the ecological systems that sustain living things—and us. Nature can often repair these systems (forests grow back, for example); but humans are changing systems faster than nature can adapt.
10. Each of us can powerfully affect the fate of the natural world.
    Because each of us is directly plugged into the planet, the actions we take—or fail to take—profoundly influence earth’s systems.

For more information:

• For more on Mike Weilbacher, check out Mike Weilbacher’s website and his beautiful Natural Selections blog.
• The No Child Left Inside Coalition is found here, and info on the NCLI Act is here.
• Watershed education: Peruse a whole page of watershed education links, or check out top-rated watershed curricula links appearing on the website of the EPA.
• Articles by David Orr are available on his website.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

What every student should know about the environment

Related posts:

1. Teaching kids about nature